Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future

On ‘Bright Future’, Adrianne Lenker, a songwriter known for turns of phrase and currents of rhyme, says it plainly: “You have my heart / I want it back.” During the high vibrance of Autumn 2022, the Big Thief band member got lucky. Everyone could come. Three musical friends – “Some of my favourite people” – had space in their busy touring schedules to join her at forest-hidden analogue studio, Double Infinity. The musicians – Hakim, Davidson and Runsteen – were known to Adrianne but newer to each other. “I had no idea what the outcome would be,” she recalls. The result? “It was magical,” she says. Adrianne’s musical risk became ‘Bright Future’, the studio’s first album, a 12-track telling of a journeyed heart. In the company of parlour instruments, Adrianne’s modern melodic and lyrical inventions create new traditions. Her vocal flights at times outwit gravity and then land, guiding along an earthly path. The wholeness of the un-spliced recordings preserves a time of musical friendship during a golden season